BERLIN It has taken years to bring one of the world's most successful Broadway musicals to Europe's biggest nation but this is not just any play, or any country.

“The Producers”, a raucous Nazi send-up, will premiere in Germany next week, complete with leg-swinging showgirls clad as stormtroopers, SS men dancing in swastika formation and the rousing number “Springtime for Hitler”.

The Berlin venue, a theatre built in the 1920s and reopened in 2006 after a major restoration, still has a Fuehrer box where the Nazi leader liked to watch light operettas.

In an interview in the Admiralspalast theatre's Fuehrerloge - which still has the best seats in the house - artistic director Rita Baus addressed the question posed widely in the German press “Can Berlin laugh at Hitler?”

“Laughter is always a sign that you've begun to come to terms with something,” Baus told AFP ahead of the May 15 premiere.

“It also allows you to reflect on things not in an intellectual way but more emotionally, in your gut. Hitler is made so ridiculous, he's laid so bare, that you're taken by surprise by your own laughter.

“Germans are ready for that - things are gradually normalising.”

“The Producers” began as a film by Jewish-American comedian Mel Brooks in 1968 which he helped adapt into a stage musical in 2001.

The plot revolves around two Jewish con artists on Broadway who figure that with a scam, they can make more money staging a flop musical than a hit so they set out to develop the worst play of all time.

But the result, “Springtime for Hitler A Gay Romp With Eva and Adolf at Berchtesgaden”, is taken for a brilliant satire by the New York theatre crowd and the protagonists land in prison for embezzlement.

“The Producers” became a smash hit too, running for six years on Broadway and picking up a record 12 Tony awards. Translations have popped up around the globe and the show has taken in more than one billion dollars worldwide.

Although “The Producers” has been staged in translation in Tel Aviv and Hitler's birthplace Austria, backers hesitated to take it to Germany, the “country of the perpetrators”.

They had reason for concern.

Even before the cast arrived in Berlin from Vienna, promotional banners resembling Nazi red-white-and-black flags on the theatre facade prompted angry calls to the police, although the illegal swastika insignia has been replaced with pretzels.

But the twisted cross will be on full display in the stage show, along with iron crosses dangling from dancing girls' bustiers and an effeminate Hitler channelling Judy Garland and singing “Heil Myself”.

The whole thing wraps up with the Germans winning World War II, kicking off a celebratory conga line.

Brooks told Berlin magazine Tip that the German staging of the show was a “triumph” for him and that he had fond memories from his time as a GI in the city in 1945. But he said he was unsure if he would attend the premiere.

“I'd have to worry about some nutso sharp-shooter taking aim at me because I dishonoured the Fuehrer,” the 82-year-old joked. “Maybe I'll sneak in another time.”

Brooks' madcap comedy, however, has prompted soul-searching in the local press about whether, six decades after the Holocaust, Germans could laugh at lines like “Don't be stupid, be a smarty, come and join the Nazi party!”.

The daily Berliner Morgenpost reported that just three years ago organisers of the Berlin film festival had been too squeamish to screen the European premiere of a movie adaptation of “The Producers” starring Matthew Broderick and Uma Thurman. This is not the first time the Third Reich has been treated with humour in Germany, however.

In 2007, Jewish film-maker Dani Levy scored a box office success - albeit a critical flop - with the slapstick comedy “My Fuehrer - The Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler” depicting the Nazi leader as a bed-wetting crybaby who just wanted his father's love.And “Obersalzburg” on German commercial television for the past two years features a lecherous Hitler in a setting remarkably similar to the British and US comedy series “The Office”.

Julius Schoeps, director of the Moses Mendelssohn Centre for European-Jewish Studies in Potsdam outside Berlin, said Germans could handle shock comedy about the war but that it still needed to be dealt with delicately.

“A lot of time has passed. What was still impossible 20, 30 years ago is possible today,” he told AFP.

“But I would recommend to anyone putting on such a show to do it so that people laugh but the laughter catches in their throats.”

Baus said tickets sales for the 1,750-seat theatre had been a bit slow - although a group of 10 from New York had just reserved seats in the Fuehrer box - but that she expected them to pick up by word of mouth.—AFP